Kevin Drum on "Obama = Bush"

I love, love, love what Kevin Drum has written to those who can't be bothered to vote for President Obama because they can't see the daylight between he and Bush.

First of all, he takes on exactly the point about Conor Friedersdorf.

...Conor isn't a liberal. Of course he's not thrilled about the prospect of voting for Obama. Not only does he dislike Obama's foreign policy, but he doesn't like Obama's domestic policy either: as far as I know, he's not a fan of Obamacare or the stimulus bill or Dodd-Frank or Obama's dismissal of Simpson-Bowles or any of that. There's nothing much there for him to like aside from the repeal of DADT.

In other words, Conor's piece is about the equivalent of E.J. Dionne telling us why he won't vote for Romney. Of course he won't. Who cares?

But there are others who equate Obama to Bush. And he goes after them as well.

Libya and the drone strikes don't even come close to comparing to Iraq.

Thank you!

I mentioned the other day that I had been spending some time hanging out in the comment threads in Glenn Greenwald's column at The Guardian. At one point I had a short conversation with the man himself on this idea of an equivalence between Obama and Bush. He actually said that when comparing the two, the Iraq invasion and occupation were not pertinent. Imagine that?!!

He, of course wants to talk only about the innocents killed by drone strikes at the same time that he completely dismisses the fact that over 100,000 civilians were killed and millions displaced as a result of the war in Iraq. They are simply not pertinent (and of course, that doesn't even get to the conversation about the embrace of torture by Bush).

You have to wonder whether or not Greenwald is dismissive about the Iraq war because of the cognitive dissonance he feels in actually having supported it. But then, I'm not his therapist, so who knows? All I DO know is that these folks who want to claim some sort of moral high ground on these issues are actually standing on feet of clay.

The fact of the matter is that politics in a democracy is ALWAYS about the "lesser of two evils," if by that we mean that its actually imperfect human beings running for office who are required to get at least slightly over 50% of the vote. There's a reason why we tend to call those who don't understand that "purists." If they actually had a better alternative, I suspect they'd be more than happy to promote it. Instead they simply complain that no one is good enough for them. That puts them on the sidelines and out of the game with their purity as cold comfort.